The university’s board defends Dr. “My Truth” amidst anti-Semitism and plagiarism allegations. So much for “Veritas.”
Nate Jackson
Until recently, the racist-hustlers at Harvard only seemed to have a problem with Asians and whites. Thanks to the disgraceful congressional testimony of university president Claudine Gay last week, however, it’s more evident than ever that Harvard also has a problem with Jews.
Gay and two other elite university presidents repeatedly refused to answer whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates campus policies about hate speech, despite numerous attempts from Harvard alumna and New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik to get that answer.
“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay smugly replied at one point. She later apologized, bizarrely adding the ultimate pinhead academic mumbo-jumbo: “Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth.”
What a ridiculous thing to say — even more so for the president of the university whose motto is “Veritas,” Latin for truth.
Harvard and numerous other universities punish those who “misgender” anyone else — in other words, speak the truth based on scientific facts. That’s not the only case where censorship runs rampant on campuses, and especially at Harvard, which The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranks dead last for free speech.
Except, evidently, if you want to kill Jews en masse.
Over the weekend, Liz Magill resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania (which ranks second worst on free speech, by the way) because of that same congressional testimony, but Gay is stubbornly maintaining her grip on her job. And why not? “Saturday Night Live” came to her defense, gently mocking her only for being just so doggone smart while absurdly lampooning Stefanik instead.
More importantly, the school’s faculty rallied behind Gay and the board circled the wagons, announcing today that “we unanimously stand in support of President Gay” and she will keep her job.
She is black, after all, and the whole Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion cult seems to be Harvard’s most important truth. Plus, giving in to a “right-wing fanatic” like Stefanik would be even worse.
What doomed Magill might have been the loss of a $100 million donation, but she’s a piker compared to Gay, who has reportedly cost Harvard more than $1 billion in withheld giving. That evidently didn’t matter to Harvard’s board, which can see perfectly well that the school maintains an endowment valued at more than $50 billion, the largest in the country.
Neither, it seems, did the board find reason for terminating Gay in allegations that she plagiarized past scholarly work. In multiple instances, including in her doctoral dissertation, it appears that Gay improperly copied sentences and sometimes entire paragraphs from the work of others, made slight tweaks to a few words, and passed it off as her own without sufficiently clear citation.
“It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest,” says Harvard’s official policy on plagiarism.
Never mind that now. Gay’s violations were technical and lazy rather than substantive and malicious, and Harvard’s board doesn’t mind, though we doubt a Harvard student would receive the same courtesy.
“On December 9,” the board said today, “the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
Ah, Gay is even going above and beyond (after she got busted, anyway). How noble.
Actually, it’s rather unusual that Gay does anything academic at all. “Unlike any previous president of Harvard,” writes National Review’s Jeffrey Blehar, she has “produced almost zero actual scholarship — a mere ten pieces in boutique academic journals since acquiring her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1998, no monographs or extended scholarly works to her name, and nothing whatsoever since 2016.”
But hey, she didn’t have anything to prove. Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund founder, says, “I have confirmed now from multiple sources that the search committee that led to President Gay’s appointment excluded non-DEI eligible candidates from the process.”
In the end, we suppose the most important part of this story is that at least Harvard’s board won’t have to look for a new president just six months after Gay took the post. That would be too much work. And what a relief that must be for Jewish students, faculty, and staff on campus.
